I decided yesterday to spend a couple of days in Salzburg, since my body is rightfully complaining, and also the rains are coming. I’ll actually welcome the rains, since the heat has been more oppressive than rain and the rain will bring cooler temperatures into all of next week.
Last nights camping experience was sort of funny. I set up camp on the far edge of the camp near a hedge, hearing no road noise and so thinking that it would be a quiet night. However, across the hedge was either some kind of event center or just the home of someone who was having a birthday bash, with live music till 1 AM! Then, crazily, workers came at 2 AM with a truck and speaking some Eastern European language to pick up whatever stuff has been rented or borrowed for the event. So much for a quiet night!
And, yet I had a great night’s sleep, which is testament of my ability to ignore external disturbances and just go back to sleep. Lucky me! 
I had been waffling about spending a few days in Salzburg since the hotels were quite expensive, but I found a room in a cool place for less than $100 a night and decided that it would be good for me to have some rest for a couple of days in a quiet place.
It was a whopping 3 miles from my campsite to the hotel, and I dropped my stuff off at the hotel and went into town to find some lunch. The hotel is up on a bluff above Salzburg.
So I climbed up the sometimes steep roads to the hotel. I knew there was some sort of elevator that would shortcut this process, but I wasn’t really sure where it was from the bottom. And I got to see some fabulous views along the way that I would have missed, had I taken the elevator in the first place.
Today was mostly a day of doing very little. I went into town to find myself some lunch, and rode a bit around town, marveling at the old baroque architecture and the gigantic castle on the hill that dominates any view of the town. There are lots of tourists in the town, but they were quite agreeable of me weaving slowly between them on my bike. I was not the only one exploring by bike.
I also got some time to think about what my next few days will be like, and where I plan to stop along the way. From my rough calculations, it seems like it will take me about a week to reach Prague once I leave Salzburg, and then another week from there to reach Berlin.
Although I have a reservation to fly back back home from Copenhagen at the end of July, there are ways to either shortcut or add more days should I need to.
Leave a Reply